Laurie Fields, PhD

• Biography Summary: Laurie Fields, Ph.D. is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and faculty of the UCSF Clinical Psychology Training Program at the UCSF School of Medicine. She is a licensed clinical psychologist, trainer, and researcher, based at the UCSF Trauma Recovery Center (TRC). The TRC was developed as a demonstration research project to provide an alternative to care for underserved victims of violent crime, and currently provides mental health services to crime victims and asylum seekers/torture survivors from around the world. Dr. Fields obtained her B.A. in 1992 from the University of Maryland and holds a dual doctorate (1998) in Clinical and Community Psychology from the University of South Carolina, Columbia. She completed pre- and post-doctoral fellowship training at the University of California, Davis in the Department of Psychiatry, and subsequently served as clinical faculty in psychiatry there. Observation of the large percentage of patients whose chronic symptoms were driven by unrecognized and unresolved trauma led her to develop a specialization in psychological trauma. She is the recipient of a USC dissertation fellowship, an APA Psychotherapy Division Development Award, and a fellowship with National Institute on Drug Abuse.

• Clinical Expertise: Dr. Fields provides specialized brief cognitive-behavioral and psychodynamic psychotherapy for traumatic stress-related disorders, anxiety, grief and loss, substance use disorders, and relationship issues for victims of violent crime at the TRC. She has over 20 years of broad experience working with multicultural populations in community and clinic settings. Her therapy approach is holistic and integrates psychodynamic, relational, cognitive-behavioral, mindfulness-spiritual, and mind-body aspects. She has an active faculty private practice in adult therapy for depression, anxiety, painful emotions, life transitions, stress, grief, trauma, and relationship issues. She also specializes in physician wellness, executive burnout, and vicarious traumatization that can occur in many high-stress professions.

• Educational Expertise: Dr. Fields joined the UCSF Trauma Recovery Center faculty in 2006 where she serves as primary instructor for the Traumatic Stress Treatment Seminar and as a senior clinical supervisor with a focus on assessment, diagnosis and treatment of traumatic stress-related disorders, as well as vicarious traumatization. She teaches graduate psychology interns and postgraduate psychology fellows, medical students, social work interns, residents, faculty, and housestaff.

• Research Areas: Dr. Fields’ clinical research includes development of assessment-guided treatment models for the range of simple-to-complex traumatic stress responses in public sector and ethnic minority populations. Her focus is on the development of low-cost, accessible psychotherapies that integrate the best of evidence-based practices for use in community settings for trauma-related disorders. Projects include investigating the epidemic of drug-facilitated sexual assaults (DFSA) and developing a specialized therapy approach for treating DFSA; developing a brief integrative therapy for PTSD in the primary care setting; associations among attachment, trauma, the self, and medical illness; development and evaluation of a speaker’s bureau program to facilitate posttraumatic growth in victims of violent crime, and manualization of TRC’s innovative treatment model developed during the randomized clinical trial. Dr. Fields has published articles on topics including integrative brief psychotherapy approaches for anxiety disorders, ethnic identity development, medical education in psychiatry, stress and coping, and couple and family therapy.

• Campus Location: UCSF/SFGH Trauma Recovery Center

ORNG Applications

Websites

UCSF Profiles is managed by the UCSF
Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI),
part of the Clinical and Translational Science Award program funded by the National Center for Advancing
Translational Sciences (Grant Number UL1 TR000004) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).